When she dreams she dreams of him saying Mommy mommy mommy, no longer infant babble but the real words. She hears a woman in the supermarket bragging into the phone about how her baby is talking at nine months one evening, and she imagines what it'd be like if Will could have talked, could have made noise when he puckered his lips together, trying for "Ma." She couldn't have handled that, she doesn't think. She probably would have run away with him.

When she dreams of him he is not a baby, though sometimes he is still little. In the dreams his absolute favorite color is blue—everything blue, always—and he asks her everything. Asks for a puppy, asks where the fish go every few months when they inevitably die, asks in the bathtub for the song about the frog, please Mommy do the one about the frog. She does. She always does. His three-year-old hair is totally schizophrenic: Melissa's ringlet curls in the front, Mulder's lopsided spikes near where his soft spot used to be. Red, obviously. Freckles. His father's pouty mouth and her hands. Whenever she holds them she knows where they came from.

They practice going to school six or seven times before he actually wants to do it. Leading up to the big day where he will not be at Grandma's or at home with the babysitter or Mulder, they walk by the pre-school where he is set to attend. Kindergarteners are almost always out on the playground, laughing and galloping away and her heart shatters into two million pieces when he says, "When you and me go to school can we does that game?" because of course, obviously, there is no way he's going without her.

Her favorite questions to ask: "What does Mommy do?" "What does Daddy do?" because Will loves to answer them. He sits on her lap on the sofa, facing her and twisting her necklace, his chubby legs on either side of her thighs. She bounces him up and down. He pretends to think for a minute, messing with her, before saying, "Mommy works for the Bureau of Binvegetagation, and Daddy reads me books."

She reads him books too, of course, but he prefers Dr. Suess and Shell Silverstein to Moby Dick.

Sometimes when she gets home from work, she finds both boys asleep in the living room, collectively too big for the furniture: Will on Mulder's chest, one of Mulder's legs propped on the coffee table, the other hanging off the arm of the couch, a hand splayed protectively across their son's back. Two sets of snores. She always stares at them a moment, eyes glassy, before moving to the kitchen to make dinner. In the dreams she thinks, one of these days I'm gonna remember to take a picture. She never does. It doesn't matter because they never break the habit of taking up her space.

It baffles her how exactly the same they are. It baffles her that even though William is growing up she wakes up some nights with him in their bed, his baby blanket under his chin and his body tucked close to hers. As soon as he wakes up in the morning he alters his position to mimic Mulder's exactly, and by the time she opens her eyes there are always two old men beside her on their backs, hands behind their heads, ankles crossed. She always laughs. Always tickles Will's belly because she knows he's awake and pushes the crazy hair off of his forehead. "I love you, little man," she tells him, and he cracks his eyes open and wiggles his eyebrows. Exactly the same.

In the dreams they get a turtle when Will is five or six because, like Mulder, he is allergic to most small adorable mammals. Scully tells him about Queequeg though, and he names the turtle Whale. "He's humoring you," Mulder teases. He is probably right.

William is smart. William is newly obsessed with doing magic tricks and for Christmas she knows that Charlie is getting him a magician's hat. "I swear to god if there's a bunny in there," she says, and Mulder tells her to shut up, you know you'd love it. William hears this end of the conversation and would like to know if "shut up" still qualifies as a time-out word.

"Yes," she says, at the same moment Mulder says "Most of the time."

His favorite meal is pancakes. Any and every time of day is pancake time, and Mulder seems to agree. She spends a lot of Saturday mornings covered in Bisquick.

She dreams that when he is seven they put him on a kiddie baseball team that Mulder is obsessed with, and he is terrible, and it is the cutest thing she's ever seen until he gets upset about it. After one particularly ugly game day experience in which Will misses the ball every time it comes within a twenty foot radius and manages to get hit in the head not once but twice, Mulder tells her not to worry, but her men are going to be out late. It's after eleven when she finds them at the Georgetown Day baseball fields, William holding the bat and Mulder kneeling behind him to help, waiting for the Louisville Slugger to fire away. "Hips before hands," she hears him say, and then hears William's smaller, more determined voice repeat it. She's silent as she watches the pitches come at them through the dark. They miss every single one until they get a foul, at which Mulder yells "HOOOME RUN" and tosses William over his shoulder and runs the bases, both of them cheering the whole way, the game forgotten.

That night in bed: "He's so lucky, Mulder. He's so lucky to have you." I'm so lucky to have you. We are both so lucky, because we almost didn't.

He slides up against her back, nuzzling into the neck space between her shoulder and chin. "Hips before hands, Scully," he tells her. "Works every time."

When he is ten Bill, Tara, and Matthew come for Christmas and Matthew asks if it's weird having parents who aren't married. Will is quiet for the rest of the visit. She asks him when they leave: "Would you rather us be married?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think it would change anything?"

"Do you?" he asks her, and looks at her with big eyes, and Jesus Christ he looks like Mulder, he looks so much like Mulder.

She runs her hands through his hair and pulls his face close and kisses his forehead. "Sweetie," she tells him, just as Mulder drops something in the kitchen two rooms away and punctuates it with a loud "shit!" "It doesn't get more married than this."

He smiles. She beams.

The summer before William starts middle school Mulder asks her to marry him anyway, and they pay forty-five dollars to stand in front of a justice of the peace in a D.C. courthouse on a Friday afternoon and exchange vows, with Skinner and Maggie and their child as witnesses. Maggie takes Will for the weekend. She and Mulder lay around in bed and it is warm and the sunshine is perfect, but by Sunday morning they realize that they're terrible at being away from their kid and go to pick him up. She drives—she knows it's a dream because she drives. On the way, Mulder says, "You know what he told me when I told him to have fun at Grandma's?"

"What?" she asks, a wry smile already forming on her lips.

"He clapped me on the arm and said, 'Be a gentleman.'"

"And you questioned his paternity for what—nine months?" She laughs. It dissipates in time for her to see his eyes flick down to her stomach, an echo of a time that was not so sunny and bright. He is quiet for a moment.

"I… never."

"Mulder, I'm—"

"Never."

"Okay."

"He was always gonna be ours."

She swallows, nods. A lump sits thick in her throat. "Okay."

She knows what it means to wear his ring now. She knows that they are an inevitable sum, that he believes in the three of them like a religion. In the dreams she always removes the wedding band from her finger and wears it on her necklace, letting it bump against the cross.

William has covered his room with posters. William has gotten braces. William has grown six inches in eleven months.

At twelve and thirteen she dreams he is brilliant, that he loves books and literature instead of science, that he makes fun of her and calls her old, that his hair is still crazy. She dreams that she comes home to Mulder and their son pouring over old timey, obscure publications, that she comes home and they're both on the phone with the Gunmen—in her dreams they are alive—and that the pediatrician says he's going to be taller than his father. That already, in his earliest teenage years, he towers over her. Kisses her forehead before saying goodnight. Is wickedly handsome despite his lankiness and tendency to be shy. He likes to walk with her. He reminds her of her brothers although he is nothing like them. He pushes the cart in the grocery store and makes a show of being able to reach the items she cannot. He speaks in funny accents. He is learning French. He wants to go to London. In the dreams Mulder tells her he's been flirting with a girl in his history class who says that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't really shoot JFK. Scully believes him.

William does not get older than that. That is where the dreams stop.

Sometimes when she wakes up in the middle of the night she doesn't really believe she's in Virginia. In the empty rural dark she can't not be in D.C., her son can't not be asleep in the adjacent room. It can't not be 2002, 2003, 2004. It always takes her a moment for the truth to come back—to remember that there isn't a ring, that she never saw them playing baseball, that William was nine months old the last time she held him and she thought Mulder was dead and he didn't call her Mommy, they never sang the frog song, never got the turtle, never lay in bed and tickled and ate pancakes Saturday after Saturday. These are the nights her chest feels like it's going to crack open. The nights when her hair feels too long, like it's going to strangle her, when she doesn't want to be a doctor anymore, when their isolated cabin is not enough and 2012 is coming and she's never going to see him before then—

What if she doesn't see him before then—

What if—

Mommy works for the Bureau of Binvegetagation, and Daddy reads me books.

I love you, little man.

These are also the nights when Mulder rolls over and holds her tight, and she whispers into the pillow that when she saw him in her mind's eye he was five this time, and was trying on Frohike's combat boots and tracking mud all over their kitchen.

She tells him the baseball story.

She tells him the truth.

He's so lucky to have you.

"I'm so lucky to have you." She is.

She is.